Slideshow: A year of space firsts

WASHINGTON – After several years adrift, the U.S. space program provided several technical firsts in 2012 that will soon extend beyond our solar system. Meanwhile, China demonstrated that it is a serious space-faring nation by taking the first steps toward establishing its own space station.

Few space feats since the Apollo moon landings captured the imagination of Earthlings like the Aug. 6 landing of the Mars Curiosity Rover at Gale Crater. NASA Jet Propulsion Lab rocket engineers arguably pulled off the most spectacular and nerve-wracking landings since the Apollo 11 lunar module touched down at Tranquility Base in 1969. JPL’s risky, untested sky crane technique worked perfectly after mission controllers endured a now famous “Seven Minutes of Terror” as the Curiosity probe blaze through the thin Martian atmosphere (view video below).

"We [now] have a priceless national asset" on Mars, a jubilant Pete Theisinger, the Mars Science Laboratory project manager, declared after Curiosity landed.

Building on the early success of Curiosity, the space agency announced this week a new multi-year Mars exploration program that includes a more sophisticated rover set to launch in 2020. Between now and 2020, a series of Mars mission will study the Martian atmosphere and interior while relay satellites are launched to provide data links for future missions.

There were other space firsts in 2012, including the arrival of the first commercial cargo ship to the International Space Station, the first Chinese female taikonaut and China’s initial effort to build a space station.

Elsewhere in the solar system, a U.S. probe found frozen water on the scorched inner-most planet, Mercury. And a pair of U.S. probes heading out of the solar system discovered a “magnetic highway” that connects our heliosphere with interstellar space.

I don’t believe we have a define goal in mind for space. I see going above earth’s orbit as an essential extension of our intelligence. It is something we should be able to do, every day and twice on Sunday. It should be common place. We should double down and create a platform that supports regular use of space. As the active intelligence on this planet we are the protectors of life. That to me is our mission in space. We need the resources, three planets to support out current level of activities. We can continue to dig and burn our way across the planet. Until we all live in the Sahara or we can decide to start the migration to space now. Before we are force to.
The current idea for going to mars to put a few humans down gravity well seems to be a waste of resources. Why get trapped on another planet? What do we hope to achieve? Are we playing king of the hill? We can go to mars and get back home. How does this play out a year after we leave mars? What about ten years after leaving mars? The hold mission to mars just seems childish. The Chinese might do this to prove they can but we should know better. It‘s not about the giant leap. It’s about successive leaps that create mile stones to multiple goals. Simple example is Lois and Clark versus the railroads system. Both set off across America but any given day, you can get on a train.

Plenty of explorers willing to make the one-way trip to Mars? That's hard to believe.
Back when, explorers may have wondered if they would ever get back home, but at least they had air to breathe, and water and food available. This is not quite the same thing, eh? Whatever air and food is what you carry with you. Then you're history.
I think another problem with such a long mission will be spending so much time with either no gravity, or much less gravity than we have here. So that if a return trip is contemplated, your recovery period will be very long. I think we need to spin these spaceships. I've read that people might never fully recover from such long missions.

The space feats of the US show that in terms engineering talent, know how and foresight US is much ahead of the rest of the world and has a very rich scientific and engineering data base .
Other competitors may be decades behind as far as this strength is concerned.

@green_ee : "Today, there's a lot of dark and gloomy clouds overhead as we worry about outsourcing, a languishing economy..."
Compared to the problems of getting a man to the Moon or a rover to Mars, these seem almost trivial. All it would take is some political will and a curb on greed. And it issulstrates the differences between politicians and Engineers.

There was a very clever idea developed by NASA about 20 years ago to solve the fuel problem: Synthesize it on Mars. The idea was to send a solar-powered fuel-synthesizer to Mars ahead-of-time, along with some liquid hydrogen. The plant would land, and begin synthesizing liquid oxygen and liquid methane from dis-associated atmospheric martian CO2 (O2 for liquid OX, C plus H2 for CH4 methane) . Given the low atmospheric pressure on Mars, this could take a very long time to make enough fuel.

One of the biggest obstacles to a manned mission to Mars -- besides getting there, of course -- is overcoming the Martian "gravity well" once it's time to leave. How do we bring enough propulsion energy along to get off the surface? We are nowhere near figuring out that problem, hence the debate about going to the Martian moons and their smaller gravity wells. The other option, of course, is to make a manned mission a one-way trip. There are plenty of explorers out there who would be willing to make such a trip.

I've been torn between the wild success of the Mars rover program (coming up on 9 years of operation, despite a 90-day design-life), versus our inability to conduct a manned mission to Mars. I'm certain that we have retrieved much more scientific data with the robotic missions than we could have ever hoped for with humans, but the bragging-rights are much less. Growing up with the lunar program in the 60's, there was an incredible amount of pride we as a nation earned, and it fostered rapid growth in technology development. Today, there's a lot of dark and gloomy clouds overhead as we worry about outsourcing, a languishing economy, and how college graduates will pay-off their mountain of student loans.